Dina Rizk Khoury's book, which spans three centuries of Ottoman history, offers an interpretation of relations between the central Ottoman empire and the frontier city of Mosul during the early modern period. Basing her work on Ottoman and Iraqi archival sources, the author demonstrates that, contrary to the accepted view, the links between the central state and provincial social groups in fact grew stronger throughout the period. The development and expansion of the system of tax farms and entitlements, for example, bound the provincial service gentry, drawn from mercantile, military and bureaucratic provincial families, to the Ottoman state structure, notwithstanding the apparent weakening of administrative controls. This comparative and broad-ranging book will be of interest to Middle East historians and Ottomanists, as well as to those concerned with the process of state formation in the early modern period. Prizewinner - The British-Kuwait Friendship Society prize in Middle Eastern studies

When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.

This comparative and broad-ranging book spans three centuries of Ottoman history. It offers a new interpretation of the relations between the central Ottoman empire and provincial Iraqi society in the early modern period, and demonstrates that, contrary to the accepted view, their military, fiscal and political links strenghtened rather than weakened over the period. The book will be of interest to historians of the Middle East and to Ottomanists, as well as to political scientists and those concerned with the process of state formation.

When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.